- David Butler accepted the position of a FDC Construction Coordinator and will start on Aug. 2. Both Bill and Lubomir are confident he will do the job. He has expertise in wrking with PCBs which may be helpful for Fernando when testing our PCBs.

- Lubomir presented a Fatstrack version of the production with 5 people occupied, linked above. It will take ~12 working days to produce one layer (one wire and two cathode planes). This is to be compared to the previous version with 8 people producing one layer for ~6 working days. In case of 5 people, two techs are working on the two cathodes (one of them with a ground plane), one electrical tech is soldering the cathode connectors and the wires, two technicians are preparing the wire frame and string the wires. Eugene asked about other intermediate options: with 6,7 people available. Bill: the schedule will become realistic when we start the production (everybody agrees). Fernando: we must include additional, probably only visual inspection of the electrical part of the wire frames before starting the stringing. Berni: we should include the machining of the wire frames in the schedule even if it will be done outside.   

 

- Fernando: we don't have yet the first article PCBs. Recently space was freed in F117 for the PCB testing. They are interviewing people for a tech position, to work on the testing.

- Cathode foils: Roger showed us a plastic cylinder and a paper sample he received from the company to be used for transporting the foils. Mark said this paper should work (he had bad experience before with a sticky on one side paper). Fernando and Glenn suggested possible improvements: placing caps on the cylinder ends, using two cylinders with the foil in between. There are also other questions that need to be iterated with the company, like how many foils will be rolled on one cylinder. Roger will further communicate with the company to improve the packaging, while Mark and Casey will exercise packing using the company's paper. Roger is also checking the Gerber files and will send them soon to the company for quotation.  

- We have now two (one of each type) new design cathode frames machined in our machine shop. There was a problem with the vacuum fixture during the machining of one of the frames. According to Bill the procedure will change and this will not reoccur. Mark and Casey will prototype the new flapping design (to improve the grounding), using the foils that we have now. Roger will give them drawings to cut the flaps according to the new design. Mark and Casey will also improve the procedure of gluing the foil to the transfer ring so that there's extra length to be used for the flaps.

== Full-scale prototype test results  ==

- Beni explained the procedure he used to calculate the wire resolution. The top two wire planes are read out, which wires are parallel. He plots the difference of the distances calculated from the drift times of the two layers as a function of the angle alpha (a drawing explaining this is attached above). He extracts the resolution for angles close to zero and gets about 200microns. The resolution is getting better if applying angle corrections. There's still a dependence of the corrected difference on the angle. Possible explanation: the time to distance relation used was for the standard field/sense voltages and now we have zero voltage on the field wires (otherwise it trips).

- Fernando asked if we are happy with the present gain and dynamic range of the pre-amps. Lubomir: in principle we can adjust the HV to correspond to the dynamic range of the cards

but it affects also the resolution. Now we have the gain at the cathode cards of 2.6mV/fC which is the lowest value in the cathode gain range. It would be better to have also lower gains (like 2.3) possible. Part of the problem about choosing the working HV is that we suspect we have oxygen contamination that  reduces the amplitude: up to factor of two effect for the longest drift distances. If this is the case, without contamination we could lower the HV by ~100V and have much narrower dynamic range.

- We still don't have all the hardware needed to set-up the oxygen measurement system. First, Casey and Mark will install wheels on the rack. Beni is still waiting for the flow controller.